Split

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Why Split Rewards Smart Budget Travelers A few summers ago I arrived in Split on an overnight ferry from Ancona, bags over one shoulder, convinced I’d overpaid for my room. I hadn’t. The place was a ten-minute walk from the Riva promenade, clean sheets on the bed, and a window that caught enough of a sea breeze to sleep through August. Two doors down, a hotel with “palace view” in the name was charging three times as much. Same neighborhood, same buzz of the old town at night, same morning smell of grilled fish drifting up from the market. The gap came down to one hour I’d spent the month before figuring out where the best budget hotels in Split actually hide. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Cheap Flights from Berlin to Split: The Adriatic Is Closer Than You Think I’d been putting it off for two summers. Split always felt like one of those places that would cost a fortune once you factored in the flights — sun-soaked Dalmatian coast, UNESCO World Heritage palace in the middle of town, ferries to Hvar and Brač right from the harbour. Then I actually searched in April, aimed for September, and landed a €34 one-way on easyJet from BER. The flight was under two hours. I walked out of Split Airport into warm evening air and couldn’t quite believe it hadn’t cost more. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Split, Where the Palace Is the City We almost skipped Split. The plan was a quick overnight before catching a ferry to Hvar, because “it’s just the port town”, a friend said. We were wrong, and so was she. We checked into a guesthouse and only later realised our room was inside a 1,700-year-old Roman palace — our morning coffee came from a café wedged against an emperor’s wall, and the “Old Town” we kept getting lost in was Diocletian’s Palace itself, still lived in, still open to the sky. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Croatia, in One Sentence We nearly didn’t go. Three days out, my wife was reading me a forum thread on her phone — “season’s basically over by September, half the ferries stop, you’ll be swimming in cold water” — and asking, gently, whether we’d booked a fortnight of shuttered konobas and empty harbours. We went anyway. And the afternoon we slipped off the back of a Hvar beach into water that turned out to be 25 C, warmer than the sea had been all summer, I did the math on the villa we’d booked for a third of the August rate. We’d timed it almost perfectly by accident, and I’ll tell you exactly where the trap is below. ...